1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of information technology. More particularly, the present invention relates to a means for searching information stored in association with network nodes or web site addresses. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for creating a user defined search for certain nodes, links, or web site addresses.
2. Description of Related Art
The worldwide network of computers commonly known as the xe2x80x9cInternetxe2x80x9d has seen explosive growth in the last several years. Mainly, this growth has been fueled by the introduction and widespread use of so-called xe2x80x9cweb browsers,xe2x80x9d which enable simple graphical user interface-based access to network servers, which support documents formatted as so-called xe2x80x9cweb pages.xe2x80x9d A browser is a program that is executed on a graphical user interface (GUI), which allows a user to read hypertext by means of the GUI. The browser provides some means of viewing the contents of web pages (or nodes) and of navigating from one web page to another.
Examples of browsers for the World-Wide Web (WWW) include: Netscape Navigator from Netscape Communications Corporation, 501 East Middlefield Road, Mountain View, Calif. 94043, U.S.A.; Microsoft Internet Explorer, available from Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Wash.; and NCSA Mosaic, first available from National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Ill., U.S.A. Web browsers act as clients of remote web servers.
The WWW is a massive hypertext system that a computer user accesses using an information access apparatus such as a WWW browser computer application. The WWW browser application communicates with information provider apparatuses, such as WWW server computer applications, to obtain information and services in the form of web pages. These web pages are identified by unique Universal Resource Locators (URL). Typically, a browser application provides bookmark capability for storing URLs for user-selected web pages. This simplifies the user""s future access to these bookmarked web pages.
The background of the World Wide Web-WWW browser applications and Uniform Resource Locators-are well described by reference to the first chapter of Instant HTML Web Pages by Wayne Ause, Ziff-Davis Press, ISBN 1-56276-363-6, copyright 1995, pages 1-15, hereby incorporated by reference as illustrative of the prior art. The URL specification, also incorporated by reference, is described in RFC1738 and can be found on the WWW at http://www.cis.ohiostate.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc1738.html.
Although the invention applies to information access and information provider apparatus, WWW browser and WWW server applications are representative of the technology. As such, this application describes the invention within the context of a preferred embodiment utilizing WWW browser and WWW server applications.
As mentioned above, the WWW is a massive hypertext system. Thus, the information provided to a user often includes references to other related information. These references are via hypertext links. Activating these hypertext links often results in accessing completely different web pages (supplied from completely different WWW server applications on other computer systems) from the web page that contains the link. Thus, a user often follows many links to reach desired information or services.
One difficulty when traversing these links is that the user often loses track of the sequence of links used to arrive at a particular web page. Therefore, the user has difficulty returning to a web page of interest. A bookmark facility addresses this problem by providing a mechanism to store and recall specific web pages of interest. Each bookmark comprises the title of the web page and the URL used to access the web page. Additionally, bookmarks often contain the date the web page was last visited, and the date the web page was bookmarked, along with additional information.
Conventional browsers often provide the user with a search tool for searching the Internet for a user defined search term. However, browser search tools are normally links to a designated search engine at a server. The actually searching is performed by at the server rather than being performed as a function of the browser itself. The user may also accesses other resources on the Internet for search tools and specialty tools for finding specific information related to a user defined search term.
One problem with current web page documents is that the pages are inadequately hyperlinked. The author of the web page decides which terms are to be hyperlinked. Another problem is that even if a term is linked, the author again decides which resource to link the term to. Conventionally, links are provided to only a single resource so any additional information needed by the reader must be acquired independently by the reader. This is usually accomplished by designing a search strategy for the term or accessing a specialty resource for the desired information
It would be advantageous to provide users with a search tool function on a browser for searching terms on a web page being viewed. It would further be advantageous to provide a user with a configurable search tool for defining a multitude of independent search strategies. It would be even more advantageous to provide the user with a plurality of search tools for simultaneous searching for a term in a web page, using different search configurations. Finally, it would be even more advantageous to provide the user with a means to create pseudo links to a term by defining a plurality of search tools for simultaneous searching for a term in a web page, thereby allowing the user to access related information to the term in much the same manner as a conventional link.
The present invention discloses a method and apparatus for creating user defined search tools and configuring the tools on a web browser. Initially, the user sets a series of select search preferences, which define a select search tool. The preferences relate to the type of search tool being defined by the user, such as a select search engine search, a universal resource locator (URL) extension search or suffix, or a user defined search string. Once created, the select search tool may be placed on the browser button bar as a search button, or it may be incorporated in an existing search button as a search tool in a drop down menu. By selecting a term, the user effectively creates pseudo links to the selected term by simultaneously or sequentially searching a term using the predefined select search preferences, thus allowing the user to access resources related to the term in much the same manner as a conventional link.